Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Series:

Mars #2

Publisher:

Bantam

Copyright:

April 1994

Printing:

June 1995

ISBN:

0-553-57239-3

Format:

Mass market

Pages:

624

Green Mars is a direct sequel to Red Mars, picking up a few years after the end of the previous
book. It looks like the whole Mars saga should be read as one extremely
long novel with multiple internal climaxes. Robinson provides very little
for the new reader of who's who and what they're doing, so reading this
book without reading the previous one is likely to be confusing.

In many ways, Green Mars is more of the same, although this time
Robinson tells the story in straight chronological order rather than
leading with a hook from later in the story. Each part follows a
different inhabitant of Mars from a close third-person perspective,
following some new immigrants and next-generation Mars natives as well as
the First Hundred. It's a powerful and well-executed technique that's
well-suited for a book of this length. The reader ends up feeling like
they know each character who gets a turn at center stage, has some feeling
for the gap between how they see themselves and how other people see them
(this is particularly noticeable and interesting for Maya), and gets time
to get to know the major players better than if they were just supporting
characters.

The drawback, as with so much of how Robinson writes these books, is the
length. Green Mars continues in the footsteps of the previous
volume, sprawling all over the story and filling every corner with masses
of detail. As before, there are long sections of travel over the surface
of Mars and enough details of Martian geography to satisfy the most rabid
enthusiast. Sometimes this worked for me and sometimes it didn't. The
conclusion, for example, while a bit over-long, gained a grandeur and
emotional resonance from the extended description, and throughout the book
Robinson establishes a feeling for the sheer size of Mars through
techniques that require a similar mass of words. The early sections of
the book, however, bogged down badly. Even my enjoyment of Sax's
character wasn't enough for me to feel like the story was moving along
promptly in his part.

Locus's Gary Wolfe noted the partial switch of emphasis from
Martian geography and the technical details of the terraforming project to
politics and forming a new government as a potential drawback. I found
the opposite. "What Is to Be Done?", covering an extended conference on
politics, governance, and tactics, was one of the best parts of the book
for me. Robinson may be on firmer ground with the science, but I don't
care about it as much and have little reaction to it other than admiring
the obvious depth of research. The politics were a much-enjoyed change of
pace and felt more dynamic and intriguing. I recognized the process,
factions, disputes, and frustration in the political gathering from my own
experiences with groups trying to decide less monumental issues. (It
probably helps that I read this book while news.groups was in the middle
of a huge discussion about how the newsgroup creation system should work.)
It's hard to put as much depth into one's politics as Robinson puts into
the hard sciences, but I'm impressed by how well he succeeds. He doesn't
have characters switch viewpoints easily, doesn't let his protagonists
have unrealistic influences over world politics, writes in admirable
representatives of several different perspectives (huge corporations take
a pretty uniform beating, but there's even a sympathetic one of those,
albeit because it behaves completely differently), and provides an
excellent sense of the momentum of politics and political movements.

This is a noticeably better book than Red Mars. The interplay of
personalities is as detailed as before but plays out across a larger stage
and with larger stakes to the personal drama. Robinson still indulges in
pages of digressions about the science of Mars colonization, but he does
so less frequently and more of the digressions tackle subtle political
problems with concrete effects on the plot. I felt he put more drama into
the changes and perils of Martian geography, too; the conclusion of
Green Mars is gripping and exciting where similar scenes in
Red Mars was often confusing and slow. It's still horribly long
and drags badly in places, but this book I truly enjoyed rather than just
waded through (at least once I got past the slow initial sections).
Hopefully Blue Mars will continue the trend.

One wording complaint: Robinson uses several words like areoformation for
aspects of the Martian terraforming. I understand the formation, from
Ares, and the logic and politics of using such words is sound within his
world. However, every time I see one, I read "aeroformation," mentally
file the process as something related to wind erosion, and then get
confused and have to backtrack. I can't think of a better root to use
either, but the visual confusion is annoying.